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COPYRIGHT, I913, BY CHARLES W. ELIOT 
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CIA361414 



INTRODUCTION 

It is evident to students of our educational sys- 
tem that the conflict so long waged between for- 
mal book training and the newer, more practical 
forms of education, centering in the social and 
industrial needs of children, has at last become 
a winning fight in favor of the newer education. 
No longer does the educational leader hesitate to 
recognize, in theory, at least, the widespread de- 
mand for a curriculum which will better fit pupils 
for their various vocations; moreover, substan- 
tial progress has been made in introducing hand- 
work, eyework, and sense - training into our 
schools, urban and rural. 

The argument that has been chiefly instrumen- 
tal in winning support for a closer adjustment of 
our schools to the changing social and industrial 
demands has been predicated on the unfortunate 
effect of the old regime upon the individual pupil. 
He dropped out of the school at too early an age, 
because of inability to do the bookish kind of 
iii 



INTRODUCTION 

work demanded almost exclusively by the 
schools; or, if he survived the system of training 
imposed upon him by the school machine, he 
found himself ill-prepared for the work confront- 
ing him. 

In the study of the effects of the different 
forms of education, however, we have often lost 
sight of the equally important relation of school- 
training to national progress. China, Japan, In- 
dia, and other Oriental countries furnish signif- 
icant lessons of the unprogressive effects upon 
national life of the formal memoriter study, to- 
wards which much of our own school training has 
tended in the past. In this monograph Dr. Eliot 
interprets the social conditions which he found to 
exist in his travels in the East, and shows the re- 
lation of these conditions to the kinds of training 
that have prevailed in these Oriental countries. 
It is the hope of the editor and the publishers 
that this monograph will give even greater im- 
petus to the movement for more practical train- 
ing in our schools, — a movement which to no 
inconsiderable extent has been the result of Dr. 
Eliot's own educational leadership. 



THE TENDENCY TO THE CONCRETE 

AND PRACTICAL IN MODERN 

EDUCATION 



The relation of education to national progress 

I have just been looking for two months and a 
half at an immense nation, in whose method of 
education there has been nothing of either the 
concrete or the practical. The peculiar quality 
of Chinese education has had a prodigious effect 
on the career of the nation, and explains, in fact, 
its present backward condition. As you know, 
in China education has been purely literary, 
philosophical, and ethical, and the educated men 
have had control of the national life -to an ex- 
traordinary degree. Official life in China was only 
to be entered through the gate of education, — 

1 An address delivered before the Massachusetts State 
Teachers' Association. 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

through a careful, prolonged study of the Chinese 
classics, through the acquiring not only of the 
classics themselves, but of skill in interpreting 
them and in reproducing similar compositions. 
The education had not one particle of the con- 
crete in it. A Chinese scholar ; young or old, was 
not expected to use his hands for any purpose 
except for writing and, if he were very poor, for 
cooking his own food. It had something of the 
practical, because it was only through education 
that public office could be attained, — public of- 
fice and the teacher's calling being the only suit- 
able occupations for a scholar. If we add cleric to 
teacher, how much the Chinese educational situ- 
ation resembles that of Europe for two centu- 
ries after the revival of Greek! 

Now, what has been the result in China? Their 
education was highly creditable as a literary, 
philosophical, and ethical training. A young 
man who had learned innumerable passages from 
the Chinese classics, could write Chinese charac- 
ters by the thousand, could himself write both 
prose and verse acceptably, and had passed the 
severe examinations for entrance to the public 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

service, had undergone a very serious intellectual 
training. The national results are not to be at- 
tributed to any defects in the particular kind of 
education which China has so highly respected 
and exclusively used; for that education provided 
an extraordinary mental training, — particu- 
larly of the memory, — and produced men who 
could tackle with great facility any job which did 
not involve acquaintance with the concrete and 
the practical, or knowledge of the experimental 
method and the inductive reasoning. 

For example, we had at Cambridge a few years 
ago a young Chinese scholar who had come to 
Harvard College with high recommendations 
from his Chinese teachers, — teachers who had 
given him the best that Chinese education had 
to offer. He was a very brilliant scholar all 
through college, easily surpassing most of the 
American contemporaries beside whom he worked. 
He then went into the Harvard Law School, and 
there again distinguished himself among the very 
best men of that strenuous school. He was sub- 
sequently employed by the best university in 
China to teach Western subjects, and particu- 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

larly economics and commercial law. The Chi- 
nese governors of the university employed him 
with reluctance; because they could not believe 
that a young Chinese studying Western subjects, 
even if he studied them seven years, could have 
reached the attainments that a Western youth — 
an American or European — would have made 
in the same time. The very intelligent and dis- 
criminating president of the university — the 
Pei-yang University at Tientsin — would not ap- 
point this young man to a professorship in his 
university until President Lowell had assured 
him in a special letter that Mr. Chao was the 
equal in law studies of any American with whom 
he had come into competition. I later talked 
with Professor Chao at the Pei-yang University 
(and I had often talked with him at Harvard), 
and he confirmed in Tientsin what he had said to 
me in Cambridge — namely, that a young Chi- 
nese who had been through a large selection of 
the Chinese classics, learned to write in the Chi- 
nese characters, and acquired the art of composi- 
tion, would find easy any study in the western 
literature, philosophy, or ethics, or indeed any 

4 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

study which called chiefly for a strong memory. 
His own case amply illustrated this doctrine. 
Countless young men in Europe, the staple of 
whose education was the Greek and Latin classics, 
have illustrated the same doctrine, mutatis mu- 
tandis. 

Therefore, the Chinese education in literature, 
philosophy, and ethics has been a sound, valu- 
able education of its kind, and thousands upon 
thousands of Chinese youth went through it, 
passed the state examinations successfully, en- 
tered upon public office, and served their genera- 
tions, some of them with distinction, all of them 
with sufficient capacity to maintain the system 
of education in public respect for more than two 
thousand years. 

Why, then, is China in its present backward con- 
dition? Why has it made no progress, until within 
fifteen or twenty years, in the arts of modern life, 
and in the modern sciences, pure or applied? 
Why is life in China almost what it was two thou- 
sand years ago? It is because the Chinese have 
never known anything about the inductive phi- 
losophy. The inductive philosophy is only four 

5 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

hundred years old; in Europe and America it has 
had much less than four hundred years of active, 
pervasive life. It is not much more than a hun- 
dred years since the inductive philosophy be- 
came an active working force in the general mind 
of Europe and America; and most of Occidental 
progress in the arts and sciences, in morality, and 
in manufactures, transportation, finance, com- 
merce, and trade has been accomplished within 
that period by the use of the inductive method 
of accurate observation, exact record, and limited 
inference. China has not had a bit of this won- 
derful experience; it has not to-day, except in the 
few thousand young men who have been trained 
within the last twenty years in Europe, America, 
or Japan. We have witnessed a revolution in 
China within a little over a year, a revolution 
prodigious in its political and social effects, and 
in its immediate accomplishments most remark- 
able. Where did that revolution come from? 
Straight from the few thousands of Chinese 
young men who have learned about the induc- 
tive philosophy and its fruits in Europe, Amer- 
ica, or Japan within the passing generation. I 
6 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

came in contact with many of the revolutionary 
officials who were striving to reorganize Chinese 
society, and to unite in one effective whole the 
immense country and the multitudinous people, 
now much divided. They were almost all of 
them men young in years, who had learned some- 
thing about the inductive philosophy in Europe, 
America, or Japan within the last twenty years. 

Characteristics of inductive philosophy 

What are the characteristics of the inductive 
philosophy? Why has it proved to have such a 
tremendous transforming power on the habits, 
manners, customs, government, religion, and 
whole life of any people that accepts it and puts 
it in practice? It proceeds from the observation 
of the concrete and the practical; it seeks the fact, 
it thinks little of the abstract or the speculative; 
it does not rely on any kind of revelation. It 
studies the fact, the concrete object, vegetable or 
mineral, solid, liquid, gaseous, or ethereal; the 
thing or being that can be seen, heard, or touched ; 
the movement or process that can be weighed 
or measured. It goes for the truth, the facts; and 

7 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

having observed the facts by eye or ear or touch, 
or any other sense-process, it compares fact with 
fact, group of facts with group, and from that 
comparison and the resulting classification, it 
draws some very limited inference, the next step 
in advance, not a far-reaching speculation away 
out among the stars or the atoms, not a full- 
fledged theory, but the very next step beyond the 
facts observed. And then it makes a careful rec- 
ord of all these observations, the groupings, the 
leadings, and the inferences. The reasoning of 
the method is as keen as the observation, and as 
accurate as the record. Out of that inductive 
process have come, we may say without exagger- 
ation, all the new ways of doing things in this 
world, all modern industries, and all the new 
freedoms, collective potencies, and social equali- 
zations. Modern economics afford one of the best 
instances of the successful use of the inductive 
method. 

Do you say that this is a material or mechani- 
cal view of human progress? By no means; be- 
cause throughout all this process of observation, 
record, and inference there flows the inventive 
8 



ESf MODERN EDUCATION 

and prophetic power of the human imagination. 
Do you suppose that Mr. Edison's work in life 
has been the product of his eyes or his fingers 
chiefly, or of a reasoning process which has never 
leaped beyond the visible or tangible fact? Far 
from it. The highest capacity of Mr. Edison, his 
finest practical quality, is his inventive and crea- 
tive imagination; and the same is true of every 
man who accomplishes in either pure or applied 
science anything in the way of advance or prog- 
ress. Plenty of people can do the routine or 
verifying work in pure and applied science; but 
to do the real progressive work one must have a 
vivid, free, and excursive imagination, as well as 
capacity for exact logical and consecutive think- 
ing, and for intense application. When, there- 
fore, we admire the fruits of the inductive phi- 
losophy, when we wonder at the extraordinary 
achievements of the inductive method in the ma- 
terial world, we must not suppose ourselves to 
be abandoning the realm of the intellectual and 
spiritual. Far from it. We are looking through 
the gateway of the largest and most fruitful field 
for the human reason and imagination. 

9 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

The inductive method in education 

But am I not straying from the announced 
subject of this discourse, — the concrete and 
practical in education? I think not. We all rec- 
ognize that within the last twenty years there 
has been an extraordinary development of inter- 
est in the concrete and practical sides of educa- 
tion. I am sometimes inclined to believe that 
America has had more to do with that develop- 
ment both at home and abroad than we Ameri- 
cans suppose; because I think that public atten- 
tion was very early directed here to the value of 
the concrete and practical in education by the 
greatest of American philosophers, — not by an 
American scientist, but by a philosopher, a seer, 
a man who had deep, pervasive thoughts and put 
them into sentences that live. I refer, of course, 
to Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was he who first in 
this country declared that the possession of some 
manual skill, some power to do work with his 
body, with his eyes, his ears, his hands, was essen- 
tial to the right quality of a cultivated man. Her- 
bert Spencer in England much later taught that 
10 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

natural science was the thing best worth know- 
ing; but he was nearly a generation after Emer- 
son. Now, neither Emerson nor Spencer could 
do much with his hands. They did not illustrate 
their doctrine in their own persons; but they 
taught with great clearness that through the 
training of the senses and through careful reason- 
ing on the testimony of the senses one may per- 
fect the thinking process in either child or adult. 
That is what American systematic education has 
lately come to believe in, and to develop as a 
working method. I remember saying in some 
previous address, that it is through practice with 
eye, ear, nose, and touch, and the same nerves 
and ganglia that transmit and record our sensa- 
tions, and set going our movements, that we all 
get our minds at work in childhood, and acquire 
not only skill with eye and hand, but also skill in 
thinking. 

I have been much disposed of late years to 
dwell upon the absense of sense-training from our 
systematic education. I believe that to have 
been the greatest defect in the kind of education 
which has come down to us from the Middle Ages, 
ii 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

from the curriculum of the Jesuit colleges, and 
from the early universities, — the omission of 
systematic training of the senses. Here, we come 
directly to the subject of this afternoon — the 
value of the concrete and practical in education. 
That value first declares itself in the improve- 
ment of the observing senses, and then in the 
skill of hand and eye which results from such 
training. 

A corporation established in Massachusetts is 
carrying on a medical school in Shanghai, China, 
and seven Or eight young American physicians 
with the aid of two or three European physicians 
are now instructing Chinese young men in the 
medical art. I was lately in one of their labora- 
tories. Twelve students were at work on histol- 
ogy — the study of the microscopic structure of the 
muscles, nerves, and organ-tissues of the body. 
These young men had had very little previous 
training in natural science; but what were they 
doing? Each man was looking through a micro- 
scope at a section of some organ on the slide, de r 
termining with the eye just what was to be seen 
under the microscope, and then drawing on 
12 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

paper what he had seen, making a representation 
in black and white of what he saw under the mi- 
croscope. Then he colored that sketch with dif- 
ferent colors to bring out more clearly the differ- 
ences of structure in the different parts of the 
object he was studying. Now, that was accurate 
eyework and nice handwork; and these young 
men had had no previous training in the use of 
the microscope or in drawing such objects. One 
has to learn how to see through a microscope. 

The results obtained in that laboratory were 
remarkable. I have seen many American stu- 
dents in the first year of medical study, doing just 
that kind of work. I never saw in any American 
school so good work done with eye and hand by 
beginners as those twelve Chinese young men 
were doing. How did they acquire that capacity? 
The Chinese characters count by thousands; they 
are little groups of short lines; and with a few 
lines an indefinite number of groups canl>e made. 
The characters differ but slightly from one 
another. The reader must look sharply at these 
Chinese characters to determine by the eye only 
what each character is, and the writer has to re- 

13 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

produce these characters in great variety by free- 
hand drawing with a fine brush dipped fre- 
quently into India ink. Those young men had 
received during their literary education that sort 
of training of the eye and the hand. Their prac- 
tice was confined to the Chinese characters; but 
it came right into play in the study of medicine, 
and will give them rapid progress in many of the 
medical arts, and facilitate their acquisition of 
the medical and surgical skills. They had re- 
ceived a valuable training of the senses, which 
was applicable in many directions. 

We Americans, like the Chinese, have dwelt 
in our schools too much on two faculties — dis- 
crimination between the shades of meaning of 
different words and phrases, and memory for 
words, phrases, narrative, description, and even 
argument. Memory training has predominated 
over training in observation and the acquisition 
of skills. I remember attending a debate in a col- 
lege not far away, two sides apparently arguing 
a burning question; but when the debate was fin- 
ished it was apparent that there had been no real 
collision of minds on the spot, only recitals of 

14 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

memorized arguments prepared beforehand. 
Mind had not met mind in the actual perform- 
ance. The contestants had only repeated from 
memory arguments they had either written 
themselves, or been helped to write, beforehand. 

The new interest in the concrete and practical 
which has come into our schools within the last 
twenty years has created some new varieties of 
school, and is beginning to reconstruct the pro- 
grams of long-established schools, both public 
and private. Is this change to result in a degra- 
dation of education? Does it mean that educa- 
tion is to be less efficient for the training of the 
mind, the imagination, and the will, more utili- 
tarian, and less ethical and inspirational? That 
is a grave question which deserves the most care- 
ful consideration. 

We all agree that the present generation is 
characterized by two strong desires. One is the 
desire for sound knowledge, not knowledge of the 
myth, the fable, or the dream, but knowledge of 
the fact, the truth; and the second is the intense 
desire to be of service to mankind. Efficient edu- 
cation is that education which enables the child 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

to satisfy its curiosity joyously, and multiply its 
contacts with the world, and the young man or 
young woman first to gratify the passion for 
truth, and then to gratify the passion for service. 
I believe that every introduction into the scheme 
or program of a grammar school, high school, 
academy, college, or university of teaching from 
the concrete and the practical is a gain towards 
this kind of efficiency. I believe that every skill 
acquired by a child at school or a student in col- 
lege brings with it an increase of mental power, 
and that the true value of any prolonged educa- 
tion may be correctly estimated by the number 
of skills the educated person has acquired, and 
by the strength of the mental grip upon the sub- 
jects and objects through which the educated 
man is enabled to earn his livelihood, and to ex- 
ercise his various powers of enjoyment. Accord- 
ingly, I have for some years been eager to advo- 
cate increased attention to the training of the 
senses, beginning young and keeping on through 
all grades of school life and through college life. 

It is astonishing to see how intelligent girls can 
go through a long systematic training, up to the 
16 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

eighteenth or nineteenth year, or even to the 
twenty-second or twenty-third, without acquir- 
ing any skill. One of the most intelligent women 
I know informed me the other day that she pos- 
sessed only one skill, that she could not sew, cook, 
play, sing, or draw ; that her only skill was 
picking berries, and that one skill she did not 
learn at school, but by accompanying her father 
on his walks during the blueberry and black- 
berry seasons. Yet this woman had thoroughly 
enjoyed a prolonged education at a good school 
and a good college. Very few persons, men or 
women, can give a. correct account of a transac- 
tion or event they have witnessed. Accordingly, 
the courts constantly have to deal with contra- 
dictory accounts of one and the same event, and 
in critical cases every bit of human evidence 
needs corroboration and verification. Few per- 
sons can use their eyes, ears, and hands with ac- 
curacy; so that the artist and the skilled artisan 
are distinguished among men for the precision 
with which they both see and touch. Many pro- 
fessional men are quite unable to use any tool or 
implement except a pen, and nowadays not even 

17 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

a pen, because of the typewriter. Indeed, if it 
were not for music and the sports, most educated 
men would possess no skills at all. 

The school subjects that contribute largely to 
sense-training 

What are the subjects which are obviously ser- 
viceable in training the senses? First, drawing, 
an admirable training for both eye and hand, — 
but how pitifully neglected throughout the whole 
American school system! Then music, which 
trains not only the ear, but the nervous system 
of the whole body, when carefully and persist- 
ently practiced. Did you ever watch an organist 
playing an organ with several banks of keys and 
many pedals? That process, particularly when 
the organist plays from memory, is one of the 
most extraordinary exhibitions of the simulta- 
neous action of many parts of the nervous system 
of which the human being is capable. The hands 
and the feet move rapidly and rhythmically, 
each hand and each foot being separate from the 
other in its motions; each ringer works separately; 
the ear takes instant note of the time and the har- 
18 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

mony and of many details in the volume of sound; 
and then the memory is at work in reproducing 
the composition from a record which exists at 
the moment only in the brain of the player. For 
an effective training of that complex nervous sys- 
tem which serves what is called the mind, play- 
ing upon a musical instrument, or singing, excels 
every other training of the nervous system to 
coordinated action, simultaneous within a frac- 
tion of a second, the co5rdination of all the nerves 
and senses in action being often intense and in- 
tensely enjoyable. 

Drawing really provides us with another lan- 
guage, another means of communicating with 
our fellow-men, which is often clearer and more 
easily and accurately apprehended than lan- 
guage. The traveler among strange people speak- 
ing a strange language can always get the vessel 
or implement he needs if he can make a drawing 
of it, for drawing is a universal language. The 
thinking process in drawing, playing an instru- 
ment, or any manual work of an accurate sort, is 
keen; and the moral lessons involved are admir- 
able. The accuracy of language has many de- 

i9 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

grees, and accuracy of speech as a moral quality 
is often hard for a child to appreciate; but any 
child knows when he has planed a small piece of 
board so level, so plane, that a straight-edge will 
show no light under it when turned about on the 
plane. That is something that can be done just 
right, and if it is not done right, the child itself 
can see that it is not right. How many of our 
school books, on which we so much rely in edu- 
cation, not only do not state things just as they 
are, but make actual misstatements! I watched 
a little child examining its illustrated spelling- 
book. At the head of the page was a little dia- 
gram of a cow, about an inch long, and against 
the diagram was printed this sentence, " This is 
a cow." That untruth is a type of many state- 
ments in our readers, geographies, and histories. 
Our books are full of such misrepresentations. 
We need to bring children in contact on every 
possible occasion with the real objects, and not 
with pictures or drawings of the objects. We 
need to set their minds at work on the concrete 
things, and not on verbal descriptions of the 
things. That is the way to train the child's 
20 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

senses, The training of the memory should be 
closely connected with the training of the senses. 
Let the child look for a moment at an object or 
group of objects, and then be asked to describe 
what he has seen. Let him hear a musical air, or 
a bird's song, and be asked to reproduce it. Let 
him practice the use of tools as soon as he has 
strength enough to guide them. Let the youth 
have practice in the use of machines as soon as he 
can safely manage them. Let the country chil- 
dren be taken into the fields and woods to study 
growing things both vegetable and animal. Let 
the city children be taken by the teacher into 
shops, parks, gardens, and museums to train eyes 
to see and memory to hold. Let laboratory work 
in zoology, chemistry, and physics be made a 
much larger part of school and college training 
than it now is. In the country the brooks, the 
plains, and the hills will give the best lessons in 
geography, and in the city the shop windows, the 
street traffic, and the railroad stations or the 
wharves will supply the best sense and memory 
training for commerce and trade. Most Ameri- 
can children have heretofore grown up in com- 
21 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

plete ignorance of the heavenly bodies and their 
motions, notwithstanding the fact that every 
child who lives by the sea, or on a prairie, or a 
hillside, has exhibited before him every night the 
stupendous spectacle of the spangled heavens. 
We have wasted this nightly opportunity to train 
the eyes of the children and to develop both 
memory and imagination. 

Contrast between Japanese and Mohammedan 
education 

The Japanese are an extraordinarily alert, nim- 
ble-minded people; and within forty years they 
have established throughout the Empire a com- 
plete school system, copied from European and 
American types. In all their schools and colleges 
they have Attained a higher average attendance 
than any other nation in the world, and they 
have secured a perfect registration of the entire 
school and college population. For years they 
have been doing, and are still doing, a great deal 
more than we are to teach through the concrete 
and the practical. It was delightful to meet, 
when walking in country places in Japan, the 
22 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

schools going out with all their teachers to walk, 
because on those walks every possible opportu- 
nity was taken to teach the children to observe 
closely and accurately, and to study the actual 
natural objects, and not pictures only, or descrip- 
tions of them. I met one day two hundred chil- 
dren, accompanied by five teachers, on a walk 
for the purpose of seeing what was going on by 
the wayside and on the more distant fields and 
hills; and not one of those children was over ten 
years of age. Those children took a walk of three 
miles that morning, and it was raining part of 
the time. Such work on the part of the teacher is 
as highly valued as any book- work he does ; and 
when the authorities are selecting teachers, they 
select persons who can do that kind of thing, and 
will not employ persons who cannot. Twenty- 
five years ago, I passed through North Africa 
from Cape Spartel on the west to Tunis on the 
east, and thence by sea to Alexandria ^and Cairo. 
On that line of travel I took frequent opportuni- 
ties to step inside schools, that I might witness 
the Mohammedan process of education. That 
process is a great exaggeration of any Christian 

23 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

book process, because from bottom to top of Mo- 
hammedan education the instruction consists of 
dictating phrases or passages from the Koran, or 
from commentaries on the Koran. It is all book- 
work, and it is the study of a single book of 
supreme authority. At Tangier I went into a 
little school for young children. A white-bearded 
man in white clothes sat in the center of a half- 
circle of children. He was armed With, a long, 
flexible fishing-rod, and he could reach every 
child with the rod. He recited three or four 
words from the Koran, and all the children 
shouted those words back to him. If any child 
were silent, he got touched up. They all repeated 
simultaneously the teacher's words, phrase by 
phrase; and that was literally the only thing done 
in that school. Later in the same winter I arrived 
at Cairo, and visited the University of Cairo, the 
largest university in the world; and there I found 
the students grouped in circles round their teach- 
ers, and the circles around teachers were very 
numerous. Teachers and students sat on straw 
piled on the stone floor; and every teacher was 
doing exactly the same thing I had seen in the 

24 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

infants' school at Tangier, only more of it; and 
he did not carry a fishing-pole. He repeated long 
passages from the Koran, or from some commen- 
tary on the Koran, generally using both the orig- 
inal and the commentary, I was told. The stu- 
dents took notes of what he dictated, and were 
called upon later to repeat what he had said. 
Still there was a single source of ideas, still a sin- 
gle book, a book in the highest degree authori- 
tative; and the teacher was dictating to the 
student what he should know, what he should 
believe, and how he should live. In this process 
there was abundant training of the memory and 
of the power to absorb the thought of another, 
and to hold in the memory philosophy, religion, 
and law thirteen centuries old. 

That method in education accounts for the 
lack of progress in civilization of the Mohamme- 
dan peoples. It relied on memory applied to 
revelation, and on submissive interpretation of 
revelation. In consequence, there has been no 
advance in natural science made in any Moham- 
medan country for several centuries. To be sure, 
there were Arabs in the tenth century who de- 

25 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

served to be called scholars. The Arabs at that 
period possessed skilled handicrafts, an architec- 
ture of their own, some skill in surgery, and a 
practical knowledge of irrigation. When the 
Moors invaded Spain, they were in some respects 
in advance of the Spaniards in the arts of both 
war and peace. These advances in arts and sci- 
ences were lost in the triumph of the Berbers over 
the Arabs in the eleventh century — the barbar- 
ous Berbers being Mohammedan strict construc- 
tionists. Our numbers and arithmetic to-day are 
largely Arabic; but that is only a strange survival 
of one bit of an arrested development in civiliza- 
tion. Moreover, as we all know, arithmetical 
reasoning is absolutely peculiar, and has very 
little application in common life. Of all the sub- 
jects taught in modern schools arithmetic, beyond 
the simplest applications of the simplest rules, is 
the least practical, because its reasoning is demon- 
strative; whereas the reasoning we have to de- 
pend on in the natural sciences and in the daily 
conduct of life is almost all probable, and not de- 
monstrative, reasoning. In the educational his- 
tory of Islam, you may find the reason for the 
26 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

kind of life the Moslem peoples have lived for the 
last nine hundred years, just as you may see in 
the history and present condition of the Chinese 
people the legitimate results of their kind of edu- 
cation. 

Through training in the concrete and the prac- 
tical all our schools should impart knowledge of 
the inductive method and of its fruits. Every 
child ought to get a glimpse of the real mode of 
ascertaining truth in this world; ought to know 
how the truth has, as a matter of fact, been come 
at in all the modern sciences, pure and applied. 
Not that the child itself can be expected to prac- 
tice the inductive method, except so far as it may 
do so in learning to observe and to make an ac- 
curate record; but every child ought to learn 
what the scientific process of study and inquiry 
is, so that in after life, when he is adult, he shall 
know how to apply, or how to get applied, in his 
own sphere or province that invaluable method. 

Inductive training through out-of-door occupations 

You may now be asking, how is it that with so 
little comprehension of the desirable processes of 
27 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

education, the generations have got on as well as 
they have ? If they have been following a method 
in education which relies chiefly on memory, 
neglecting the training of the senses and the in- 
culcation of the inductive philosophy, how have 
they attained the partial success of the last four 
hundred years, and the more rapid success of the 
last sixty years? There was no diffused systematic 
training in the modern sciences till within a hun- 
dred years. How has the civilized world got on as 
well as it has? Because the training of the succes- 
sive generations in Europe and America since the 
sixteenth century has not depended solely on the 
methods used in systematic education. The oc- 
cupations of mankind have contributed much to 
the training of the senses and to developing the 
germs of the inductive method. Agriculture, for 
example, the commonest occupation of mankind, 
is closely dependent, and more and more so in 
recent times, on accurate observation of natural 
phenomena and natural laws. All through the 
Middle Ages, and indeed at the present moment, 
war and preparations for war have provided for 
millions of men a harsh but effective training in 
28 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

the quick use of the senses at the peril of life, 
in remembering the thing to be done on the in- 
stant, in enduring the hardships of war, and 
resisting its intense temptations. War and prep- 
arations for war have been, not only for the offi- 
cer but for the private, a widespread, though not 
universal, training of the senses and of such moral 
qualities as obedience, order, promptness, and 
fidelity; and since firearms and other instruments 
of precision and high explosives have been so 
generally used in warfare, this training has ac- 
quired more and more of intellectual merit. 
Hunting and fishing have given certain classes of 
the population in Europe and America a sound 
training in quick and accurate observation, and 
in the economical use of human faculties to pro- 
cure a precarious livelihood by outwitting ani- 
mals. In the United States to-day how com- 
pletely have these conditions changed! Here in 
Massachusetts, for example, only a small propor- 
tion of the children can secure the training which 
a farm is capable of giving. Hunting for a living 
is pursued by only a very small fraction of the 
population. Wars are infrequent, and there be- 
29 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

ing only a small standing army, whole genera- 
tions grow up without any experience of war. 
Hence the school system is under obligations to 
provide as many substitutes as possible for the 
training lost when agriculture ceased to be the 
main occupation of all the civilized peoples, ma- 
chines replaced men in many of the principal 
industries, men, women, and children by the 
million have become almost automatic tenders 
and feeders of machines, and the majority of the 
population crowds into cities and large towns. 

When we consider the extreme lack of con- 
crete and practical teaching for children in coun- 
tries which, like the United States and Great 
Britain, have become intensely industrial on the 
factory system, we realize that another potent 
influence in Anglo-Saxon schools and colleges has 
had strong effect in reducing the losses and in- 
juries caused by inadequate development of con- 
crete teaching and the laboratory method in the 
school systems of those countries. That influ- 
ence has come from sports, both out-of-door and 
indoor. These generally give children and youth 
some rather strenuous training in quick observa- 

30 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

tion and prompt and accurate use of arms and 
legs in active motion. Most out-of-door sports 
require some form of quick decision, so that those 
who excel in them are found to possess a short 
time-reaction. Many indoor sports, as, for in- 
stance, games of cards, afford a good training 
of the memory. Others, like picture-puzzles, re- 
quire an intent observation of form, and particu- 
larly of outline. Others, like chess, require the 
visualizing of future possible combinations of 
many objects, each of which has its own rules of 
movement. Others, like charades, " Throwing 
Light," "Dumb Crambo," and " Twenty Ques- 
tions," need much mental alertness, some knowl- 
edge of real and fictitious characters, and a 
quick interpretation of the motions, gestures, and 
inflections of the leading actors in these sports. 
Even such simple sports as young girls and boys 
use, like tag, marbles, and hop-scotch, have in 
them considerable training value. 

We shall better appreciate what sports have 
done for Anglo-Saxon children and youth if we 
compare English and American experience in 
this respect with Chinese. The Chinese have 

3i 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

had no sports, neither out-of-door athletic sports 
nor indoor games. The popular amusements are 
gambling in very simple forms and attending 
open-air theaters. Neither the laboring class nor 
the scholar class has received any of the training 
which English and American young people get 
from their sports. There seem to be no guessing 
games in China, and no cooperative sports like 
baseball, football, and rowing in crews. The Chi- 
nese have also lacked the training which univer- 
sal military service gives a people. The conse- 
quences of these centuries-long deprivations are 
plainly to be seen in the present political and in- 
dustrial condition of China. The ruling class, 
the scholars, are men of sedentary life, with no 
taste for bodily exercises, no manual skill, and no 
muscular vigor. Under such stress as the rev- 
olutionary leaders have lately been subjected to 
they give out in body and mind, being quite unfit 
to bear the strain of intense mental labor with 
anxiety and sense of present danger. Since the 
deficiencies of Chinese education have not been 
compensated by any training like that which the 
Anglo-Saxon games and sports supply, the total 

32 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

results of the national system of education have 
been distinctly inferior to those of a somewhat 
similar education in Anglo-Saxon countries. The 
Japanese have had a much more fortunate expe- 
rience than the Chinese in this respect. Their 
ruling class were skillful swordsmen, as their re- 
tainers, the Samurai, were; and the whole people 
enjoyed the active and skillful sport of wrestling, 
which is not too dangerous or too rough a sport 
if practiced under the Japanese rule of quick 
surrender. 

The increasing need of training in schools 

These compensations for the lack of concrete, 
practical methods of instruction in school and 
college account in some measure for the fact that 
the civilized world has not suffered so much as it 
might have from this defect in systematic public 
instruction. The children and youth have them- 
selves found and developed in their sports and 
games some first-rate educational forces. But 
now, owing to the concentration of population 
in cities, the opportunities for out-of-door sports 
are very scanty for the larger part of the popula- 

33 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

tion. Have the children of Boston a good chance 
for out-of-door sports? Have the people of Bos- 
ton as a community opportunity for the training 
of their senses, such as hunting and fishing sup- 
ply to the savage or semicivilized man, and to 
some small fraction of a civilized people? The 
absolute inadequacy of the present provision of 
opportunities for sport among city children is 
good reason for giving prompt and vigorous sup- 
port to the present playground movement. Prog- 
ress, however, toward the better development 
of sports and games should not be allowed to 
check the evolution of the training of the senses 
and of concrete and practical instruction through- 
out the common - school system. It is in the 
schools that the strongest influence can be brought 
to bear in favor of the new education. 

Practical training a valuable means of moral 
and intellectual development 

The desired change in the theory and practice 
of education gets valuable support from the new 
view of what constitutes cultivation, of what pro- 
duces the cultivated man or woman. The con- 

34 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

ception of the cultivated man or woman has un- 
dergone a profound change during the last forty 
years. We used to think that the cultivated man 
or woman must be a professional person or a per- 
son of leisure, well read in literature, or in litera- 
ture and history, or possessed of some fine accom- 
plishment or some personal skill in the arts. Now 
we expect to find cultivated men in all walks of 
life. We find them in all the professions — and 
the number of professions has greatly increased 
within two generations. We find them in busi- 
ness and trade. We define a cultivated man or 
woman to be a person who has a liberal mind and 
generous heart, who has comprehensive interests 
and sympathies, and a wide range of vision, and 
who finds the great satisfactions of life in pursu- 
ing truth and rendering service. In my boyhood I 
never heard business recognized as an intellectual 
pursuit. It was supposed to depend on some for- 
tunate faculty in buying and selling. - There was 
in it a peculiar gift for money-making; but it was 
not an intellectual pursuit. Opinion on this sub- 
ject is entirely different to-day. Manufacturing, 
banking, finance, insurance, and transportation 

35 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

are all recognized as intellectual pursuits, requir- 
ing a competent education in youth. It used to 
be the practice to bring up foremen in the manu- 
facturing industries of the country through the 
factory by the training which the factory itself 
afforded. I lately passed a few days with a group 
of highly intelligent managers and directors of 
electrical manufactories. They agreed that it 
was now impossible to train foremen in the fac- 
tory itself; that foremen could no longer rise from 
the ranks, but must start in the works with the 
advantage of a good high -school or technical- 
school education. The superintendent must be 
started with the advantage of a college or poly- 
technic-school education. It is quite impossible 
to bring up a superintendent in a complicated 
industry, unless he has a thorough education be- 
fore he enters the mill or factory. These facts 
obviously emphasize strongly the need of intro- 
ducing into American schools and colleges more 
training of the senses, more concrete and practi- 
cal instruction, and more opportunity to acquire 
skill. 
We must not be discouraged in the least be- 

36 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

cause there are so many new industries and occu- 
pations for which boys and girls are to be in some 
measure prepared while at school. The various 
industries and occupations may fairly claim that 
the schools ought to serve them, ought to begin 
to train children in both manual and mental 
methods for the different kinds of work in which 
later they will severally earn their livelihoods. 
We must not imagine that this better prepara- 
tion of children to earn their livelihood is going to 
diminish the intellectual value of the school train- 
ing. On the contrary, if what I have put before 
you this afternoon has the force of reasonableness 
and truth, the modifications needed in the schools 
of the country in order to adapt their human prod- 
uct to the varied industries and occupations of 
to-day, far from degrading the schools, will de- 
cidedly improve them as institutions for moral 
and intellectual training. It is for the teachers, 
superintendents, and school committees to make 
sure that in making school instruction as con- 
crete and practical as possible, as contributory as 
possible to the later earning of the livelihood, the 
schools shall not be harmed as training-places 

37 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

for moral conduct, mental capacity, and joy in 
living. Teachers, superintendents, and commit- 
tees have a deal of studying and planning to do 
in order to put into execution the reform so ur- 
gently needed. Not only are programs to be 
reconstructed, but methods of training the in- 
dividual child's senses, memory, and power of 
concentration all together are to be invented. 
Time must be found for imparting various sorts 
of skill to the pupils; and the apparatus which 
the pupils will need for acquiring these various 
skills must be liberally provided. Fortunately 
many admirable methods and much well-devised 
apparatus can be copied and adapted from 
French and German types, and much of the ap- 
paratus can be copied from types which such 
schools as the Pratt Institute, the Franklin 
Union, and the Wentworth Institute have in- 
vented or copied from abroad. The college and 
university laboratories in chemistry, physics, 
and zoology have many suggestions to make 
about the best way to teach the elements of 
these sciences in the secondary schools. 
The friends of American high schools and acad- 

38 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

emies dread the reduction of time long allotted 
to book-study and the training of the memory, 
and the enlargement of the time to be allotted 
to observational study and to the acquisition of 
various skills of eye, ear, and hand. I venture to 
think that the new work in schools and colleges 
will do more for the training of the memory and 
the imagination, in proportion to the time al- 
lotted it, than the old work has ever done; and 
that the way to prolong the serviceable life of the 
high school and the academy, now threatened by 
their competitors the mechanic arts high schools, 
the manual - training schools, the commercial 
high schools, the arts and crafts schools, and the 
schools for apprentices, is to introduce into them 
a liberal amount of concrete and practical in- 
struction. 

The leadership of higher institutions of learning 
in this reform 

Encouraging beginnings in the reform I have 
been urging this afternoon have already been 
made in some public school systems, and much 
support may be found in the experience of the 

39 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

new competitors of the high schools. The en- 
dowed and private schools have not been as en- 
terprising in this respect as the public schools; 
partly because they cling closer to educational 
tradition, and partly because they feel compelled 
to give a large amount of time and attention to 
athletic sports. It is the higher education, how- 
ever, that, as usual, supplies the best leading. 
The case system in teaching law and medicine, 
the new way of teaching history less as a mem- 
ory study and more as an exercise in tracing 
sequences, causes, and effects, the comparative 
method in teaching government from large ac- 
cumulations of carefully recorded facts, the dia- 
gram and map method of presenting to the eye 
groups of related facts, and the museum method 
of teaching social ethics from photographs, plans, 
and models all illustrate applications of the in- 
ductive method to new ways of teaching old sub- 
jects. The widespread introduction of the lan- 
tern into schoolrooms and college lecture-rooms 
is evidence of a wholesome tendency towards a 
serious training of the eye and the memory to- 
gether. 



II 



Why Oriental education has failed 

An American educator gets many shocks when he 
is traveling in the Orient. He sees in India and 
China some tremendous failures in education, 
failures in the education of both men and wo- 
men; and when he comes to Japan he finds a 
wonderful recovery from similar failures accom- 
plished in the short space of forty-five years; 
since what they call the Restoration of 1868 they 
never use the word Revolution to describe" their 
extraordinary changes in governmental and social 
structure. 

One of the first observations I made in regard 
to education in the East was on the clear failure 
of an elaborate education based almost entirely 
on literature and the training of the memory. In 
what sense do I use the word failure? No nation 
in the world has a greater regard for education 

1 An address delivered before the Schoolmistress's Asso- 
ciation, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

41 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

than the Chinese. For many centuries it has 
been only through education that official position 
could be reached; and, on the other hand, official 
station could be attained by the child of parents 
of any sort, if he could compass an education in 
the Chinese classics. In that respect the Chinese 
have been extremely democratic, because their 
official class was open to persons of any parent- 
age, who won that dignity by a remarkable edu- 
cation based on literature, a little metaphysics, 
a little mathematics, and a strenuous training 
of the memory. That kind of education, though 
severe and highly valued, produced a civilization 
which did not get beyond that of Europe in the 
Middle Ages. In that sense Chinese education 
has been a failure. 

In Japan one learns that out of their age-long 
despotic government and their feudal system 
came a good deal of what we should call sound 
literature, much admirable art, and a general 
practice of the noble virtue called loyalty. Never- 
theless, the Japanese down to 1868 lacked the in- 
ductive method of seeking and finding truth, that 
all-powerful method which has made the Europe 
42 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

of the nineteenth century utterly different from 
the Europe of the fourteenth. 

In these three countries — India, China, and 
Japan — the status of women is very different 
from that of women in any Christian country. In 
Christian countries one sees an ideal of woman 
higher than any that exists in non-Christian 
countries; but also there exist in some Christian 
countries thousands of women of a type lower, 
or more degraded, than any found in large num- 
bers among non - Christian peoples that have 
risen above downright savagery. The high 
Christian ideal of woman combined with the 
feudal - system ideal of chivalry produced to- 
gether a status of women superior to any seen 
in Oriental countries. The traditional Japanese 
type of wife and mother involved only a limited 
education for women; but it had so many excel- 
lences that it still persists in Japan, in spite of 
the fact that Japanese opinion in regard to the 
education of women has been so liberal since the 
Restoration, and so well carried into effect, that 
a new status for women is beginning to develop 
in Japan. For instance, I visited in Japan two 

43 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

Superior Normal Schools for women. These two 
schools were graduating scores of young women 
every year, and sending them as teachers into 
the elementary and secondary schools of the 
country, and into Japanese social life well fitted 
to become the interesting and helpful comrades 
of educated men. They were better equipped 
with laboratories, kitchens, and apparatus than 
any normal schools I ever saw in the United 
States. They were furnished with the best 
means of teaching elementary chemistry, physics, 
botany, zoology, and the domestic and industrial 
arts; and their programs allotted to these sub jects 
much more time than it is customary to give 
them in the United States. What the Japanese 
have done is to seize upon, use, and master the 
inductive method. They have put that method 
into all their institutions of education, and its 
results into all their industrial, educational, and 
governmental operations. 



44 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

The lesson to be learned from the failure of 
Oriental education 

When I saw how completely helpless the mul- 
titudinous Chinese nation is in face of the Euro- 
pean nations which have long possessed the induc- 
tive method in the search for knowledge and the 
application of sciences, I understood the lesson 
which that fact should convey not only to the 
Chinese officials of the new government, but also 
to all educational statesmen and administrators 
in America and Europe. The experience of the 
Orient teaches that the educators of America 
and Europe have given altogether too small a 
place in the education of both boys and girls to 
the mastering of the inductive method, that is, 
to training the senses, to illustrating every rule 
by concrete examples, and to teaching the pupils 
to do things with eyes, ears, hands, and voice. 
All children from the primary school up should 
be taught to observe with precision, to make an 
accurate record of things observed, to group and 
compare the facts recorded, and to draw thence 
the just, limited inference. So will they learn to 

45 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

think with precision. The training of the senses 
gives at the same time the best training of the 
thinking power. The masters of the inductive 
method during the last hundred years have been 
the best thinkers the race has produced. They 
are the men who have trained their senses, their 
thinking powers, and their imaginations all at 
once, and so have been enabled to reconstruct 
all industries, all governments, and society itself. 
The best test to be applied to any long-continued 
education for girls is, what can the girl that 
has received that education do with eyes, ears, 
fingers, and thinking process? What use can she 
make of her knowledge and her skill? How 
many skills has she acquired? 

The great result of the inductive method is that 
men have thereby learned to think to advantage, 
to such advantage that they can think beyond 
the present limits of knowledge and acquire some 
new knowledge. Every bit of new knowledge 
must fit into the knowledge already acquired, 
just as the next bit of a picture-puzzle must fit 
into those bits already arranged. The investi- 
gator in history, economics, or comparative re- 
46 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

ligion as well as in chemistry, physics, or biology 
must see clearly what the complicated outlines 
of present knowledge are. Otherwise he would 
not rind the new bit that fits. No bit that does 
not fit the achieved outline will add to the de- 
velopment of the picture. 

What does this imply in the investigator? It 
implies that he must be able to hold in his own 
mind an accurate picture of that portion of the 
total puzzle which has been already arranged. He 
must be able to see and understand what has 
been already done in the subject to which he is 
devoted. His reading must be broad and accu- 
rate. He must also be able to see accurately with 
his own eyes, and touch accurately, and hear 
accurately. He must have the fullest use of these 
senses by which we get all our knowledge of the 
external world, and all our enjoyment of it. His 
memory also must be highly trained to quickness 
of grasp and long retention, and all his knowledge 
must be as it were at his fingers' ends, ready for 
instant use. 

But how does all this apply to your problem? 
How does it apply to the education of girls? 

47 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

I suppose I gave more time and study to medi- 
cal education than to any other branch of educa- 
tion while I was President of Harvard Univer- 
sity; and the development of medical education 
in the last forty-five years has been far greater 
and more fruitful than that of education for any 
other profession. Through this development, ac- 
complished in several advanced nations, and 
through the creation of many strong medical 
institutions for education and research, it has 
come about that the medical profession during 
the last forty-five years had made more con- 
tributions to human welfare and to the defense of 
mankind against pestilences, contagious diseases, 
wounds, accidents, and degrading vices than any 
other profession. What better test of the merits 
of a method of education on a large scale can we 
have than this demonstrated capacity for serving 
mankind on the part of many thousands of indi- 
viduals through a generation and a half? There 
has been hardly any change in the capacity of the 
legal profession to serve civilization during the 
last forty-five years. The greatest change in legal 
education has occurred in the United States, and 

48 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

has been due to the discovery by Professor C. G. 
Langdell of a new method of teaching law, 
namely, the method of teaching it from actual 
cases by the inductive method. Compare again 
the achievements of the medical profession dur- 
ing the last fifty years with the achievements of 
the clerical profession. The clerical profession 
has made no such gains as the medical profession 
has made. No new powers have come into their 
hands. On the contrary, one would say that the 
clerical profession was contributing no more to the 
progress of mankind since i860 than it did before. 
Again, how does all this apply to your work in 
schools for girls, or to the work in boys' schools? 
I think it indicates that a smaller proportion 
of the average school time should be given to 
memory studies like language and history, and a 
larger proportion to scientific studies, to the do- 
mestic arts, to music and drawing, and in general 
to the acquisition of skills. 

An interesting experiment and its lesson 

A very interesting experiment made about a 
year ago at the Union Club in Boston illustrates 

49 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

what I have been saying. Mr. George G. 
Crocker, Chairman of the Rapid Transit Com- 
mission, and for many years interested in testi- 
mony given from time to time about happenings 
during the construction of the Boston subways, 
invited twenty members of the Union Club, men 
in middle life or older, to witness the acting of 
a short scene by four persons, each of the twenty 
witnesses undertaking to write out immediately 
a description of what he had seen and heard. 
The scene lasted a minute and a half, and was 
acted at a moderate rate of speed and with entire 
distinctness. When the twenty onlookers sat 
down to write out each his own description of 
what he had seen, three of the number protested 
at once that they could not do it; so that only 
seventeen undertook the job. In that little scene 
there were two things specially intended to be 
noted by every witness. One of these things was 
what one actor said at a given stage of the per- 
formance, and the other was what became of a 
pocketbook. Not a single man out of the seven- 
teen noted and reported both those points, al- 
though they projected conspicuously. Hardly 

5o 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

any one gave an accurate description of even one 
of these points; and in the whole seventeen there 
were only two persons who described the scene 
at all alike. These witnesses were all well-edu- 
cated men, — judges, lawyers, manufacturers, 
and merchants, — and they were all what are 
called successful men. 

The result of this experiment is a perfectly 
legitimate outcome of the methods of education 
which have obtained not only in this country but 
in Europe for the past five centuries. That edu- 
cation has been largely memory training; it has 
not been the kind of training which enables the 
educated person to see and hear correctly, and 
then to hold firmly in the memory for even a 
few moments what has been seen and heard. 
Mr. Crocker, the lawyer who devised this experi- 
ment, wanted to bring out the fact that it is not 
reasonable to suppose that half a dozen witnesses 
of the same transaction can give anything like the 
same account of it. He wished to demonstrate 
that testimony given in court cannot be depended 
on unless corroborated, and that contradictory 
or discordant testimony must not always be at- 

5i 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

tributed to falseness in the witnesses, because it 
may be due wholly to incapacity in observing or 
remembering. The late Judge John Lowell was 
concerned with admiralty, and therefore cases of 
collision at sea often came before him. He said 
one day in my presence, " In a case of collision I 
expect the two parties interested to give me en- 
tirely different accounts of what happened. In a 
collision between sailing-vessels the two parties 
seldom agree, for instance, on which way the 
wind was bio wing." 

Again, what has this to do with the program of 
a girls' or boys' school? Much. I think it shows 
that we ought to give a great deal more time than 
we now do in schools to training the children to see 
straight, to hear correctly, to touch dexterously, 
to write a just account of an object, an event, or 
a person, and to hold in the memory things seen, 
heard, touched, and recorded. All children ought 
to learn not only to absorb quickly, but to give 
out or express quickly and truly. Even in the 
study of language and literature the children 
should not only store their memories with fine 
selections in prose and verse, but should them- 

52 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

selves make use of their acquisitions in their own 
writing, speaking, and reciting. In short, the 
teaching of language and literature should be 
made as concrete as possible, and incessant ap- 
plications should be required in the work of the 
individual pupil. Drawing from memory is a most 
useful exercise of this very sort; but to use it 
in schools to advantage the time now allotted to 
drawing would have to be multiplied by three 
or four. 

These methods of instruction are already being 
developed in this country with remarkable results ; 
but they are not much used in schools for the chil- 
dren of well-to-do parents, either girls or boys. 
They are to be seen in afternoon schools and night 
schools, in the short courses at the agricultural 
colleges, in the classes of the Young Men's 
Christian Associations, and in the demonstration 
work for farmers carried on by the Department 
of Agriculture and the General Education Board 
in the Southern States, and now just starting 
under Government control in the Northern and 
Western. This most desirable kind of instruc- 
tion is addressed, therefore, for the most part 

53 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

to adults and to persons still young whose sys- 
tematic education has been stopped too early, 
because the earnings of the parents were not suffi- 
cient to enable the family to spare the earnings 
of the children. Thus the method used for forty 
years past in medical education has penetrated 
a variety of irregular institutions of education, 
which are supplementing the work of the regular 
schools and colleges. All the trade and technical 
schools and all the vocational classes in the high 
schools are using this method ; and it is surprising 
to see, in such institutions as the Pratt Institute 
in Brooklyn and the Wentworth Institute and the 
Franklin Union in Boston, how little direction is 
needed by the pupils, how they use successfully 
refined and powerful tools and machinery, work 
each experiment out for themselves, and give a 
good account of what they have seen and done. 
Medical education has been characterized for 
thirty years past by elaborate training of the 
senses, and insistence on practice and skill, and 
on cautious accuracy in reasoning. The results in 
prodigious services from the medical profession to 
the community may well commend the methods 

54 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

of medical education to teachers of every kind, 
and to the trustees or managers of every sort of 
educational institution. 

The inductive method as applied by Professor 
Agassiz 

Many years ago I received a vivid account 
from the late Henry J. Bigelow, for forty years 
one of the most eminent surgeons of Boston, of 
the kind of instruction his son got in Professor 
Louis Agassiz's laboratory in Cambridge. When 
young Bigelow arrived for the first time at the 
laboratory, Professor Agassiz gave him a trilobite, 
a notebook, and a piece of drawing-paper, and 
said, "Examine this object all day, describe in 
this notebook what you see, and make a drawing 
of the trilobite as you see it." Young Bigelow 
worked over the trilobite all the morning, and 
thought he had described and drawn everything 
he could possibly see in it; but during the after- 
noon he discovered a few points which he had not 
recorded. The next morning Professor Agassiz 
looked at Bigelow's drawing and remarked, " You 
have not seen half of it. Go right on." That 

55 



THE CONCRETE AND PRACTICAL 

process lasted three days. Young Bigelow found 
it interesting though difficult. He went home to 
spend Sunday, and his father asked him what he 
had done at the laboratory. Young Bigelow hav- 
ing described the process, his father said, " What! 
no lecture, no sketch from Mr. Agassiz, no in- 
structions as to what you were to see?" "None/' 
the son said; "no book, no guidance, nothing to 
go by. I had to see it myself. I had to describe it 
all myself." "Well," said the father, "that is ex- 
actly the way a puppy has to learn." The com- 
parison was a just one; but Dr. Bigelow omitted 
to say that what a puppy learns he learns admir- 
ably well, and that it is a matter of life and death 
to him to put it immediately into practice. The 
son has later demonstrated in many ways that 
Professor Agassiz's method with him was a good 
one. 

A hopeful outlook for education 

I am fully persuaded that we have just begun 
to develop the right kind of education. The new 
experiments in education are in the highest de- 
gree hopeful, including Madame Montessori's 

56 



IN MODERN EDUCATION 

application to normal children of the methods 
which were developed forty years ago in this 
neighborhood by Dr. Edward Seguin for the 
benefit of defective children, and have been 
admirably used by Dr. Fernald for the past 
twenty-five years at the Massachusetts School 
for the Feebleminded at Waverley. The main 
result of all the new experiments is that they 
succeed in making both children and adults 
think, and think to advantage, and follow up 
their thinking in action. For the individual the 
result is acquired power to produce, to imagine, 
and to enjoy; — and this is the end of all true 
education. 



OUTLINE 

THE TENDENCY TO THE CONCRETE AND 
PRACTICAL IN MODERN EDUCATION 

I 

i. The relation of education to national progress . i 

2. Characteristics of inductive philosophy .... 7 

3. The inductive method in education 10 

4. The school subjects that contribute largely to 
sense-training 18 

5. Contrast between Japanese and Mohammedan 
education 22 

6. Inductive training through out-of-door occupa- 
tions 27 

7. The increasing need of training in schools ... 33 

8. Practical training. a valuable means of moral and 
intellectual development 34 

9. The leadership of higher institutions of learning 

in this reform 39 

II 

1. Why Oriental education has failed 41 

2. The lesson to be learned from the failure of Oriental 
education 45 

3. An interesting experiment and its lesson ... 49 

4. The inductive method as applied by Professor 
Agassiz 55 

5. A hopeful outlook for education 56 



